"Don't Blame Mental Illness for Mass Shootings" a recent headline at Politico begins, "Blame Men." To be fair to the author, Laura Kiesel, she probably didn't choose that title. And to be doubly fair, she doesn't blame men in general for mass shooting. She does - correctly - point out that the overwhelming majority of people who shoot other people are men.

These nuances, however, have done little to shield Kiesel from what was probably the expected response. "Politico Blames Masculinity for Mass Shootings. Here's Why That's Ridiculous," an article in The Federalist fires back. Many other responses were less polite. When it comes to mass shootings, it seems that "toxic masculinity" rears its head yet again.

Many readers, even those not prone to thinking up defenses of men, might think that blaming "men" for mass shootings takes things a bit far. Some might even think that such a claim takes anti-man rhetoric to a new level.

Such thinking would probably be wrong. There have been other times in American history when men have been blamed for most of society's ills. And some of those campaigns were even more aggressive than what we might think of as anti-male campaigns today.

Prohibition, after all, and the entire political milieu surrounding it, was often premised on attacking men. Indeed, for Victorian and Progressive reformers around the turn of the twentieth century, the only thing worse than an American male was an immigrant male. A working-class, immigrant Catholic male was perhaps the worst of all. These people were - to use a word recently given new meaning - the "deplorables" of American society 100 years ago.

The Progressive Attack on Men

Among Victorians in the late nineteenth century, and among the later Progressives in the twentieth century, men were singled out as the primary cause of a multitude of social ills ranging from child abuse to poverty. A chief factor in of all these threats to civilization was alcoholism. The fact that only some men caused such misfortune for their families was not necessarily emphasized.

This overall attitude grew out of a social environment in which women were slowly gaining in influence in cultural institutions, that set the standard for correct moral behavior. In their book Replacing Misandry, researchers Paul Nathanson and Katherine K Young note:

Though seldom ordained as religious leaders, moreover, women set the agenda also at church. They took their morality into public space with various reform movements, continuing crusades (which had begun with abolitionists in the North) against the evils that they associated with men: prostitution, intemperance, and secularism. Moreover, they were demanding more influence in all spheres of public life. At least partly on the cases of their own self-proclaimed moral and spiritual superiority to men... they demanded the right to vote, the prohibition of "demon rum," and many other changes...

In her appropriately titled book The Feminization of American Culture Ann Douglas examines these trends and how Victorian women in the late nineteenth century - having been denied the vote - turned to increasing their influence in American institutions through other means: through literature, through churches, and through family connections.

In many cases, the goal was to "civilize" men through what the reformers' opponents might have described as excessive "domestication."

Thus, for many of the prohibitionists, the abolition of alcohol was not a matter of blandly taking away a threat to public health. Prohibition offered an important step in keeping men at home, out of the saloons, and away from many of their vices.

Saloon culture, a thoroughly masculine affair at the time, was seen by reformers as both a threat to the family and to a decent political order. Murray Rothbard explains:

The men would repair at night to the saloon for chitchat, discussions, and argument - and they would generally take their political views from the saloonkeeper, who thus became the political powerhouse in his particular ward.

This institutional framework was especially troubling since it confirmed male Catholics, immigrants, and other undesirables in their ways, thus making them less likely to be converted into the ranks of the Progressives and other reformers.

Moreover, saloons were incubators for male vices since they enabled men who presumably went home from saloons nightly to beat their wives and children - but only after losing the family's income on gambling and prostitutes.

But, if alcohol could be prohibited, then the saloons would disappear also. Robbed of their saloons, men would finally be forced to go home to their wives and perhaps become reasonably productive members of society in the process.

So evident was the need to separate men from their booze that when confronted with the fact that some women opposed prohibition, at least one newspaper editorial concluded the only reason anyone could oppose such a measure was because he or she did not know of the "agony and heartbreak of mothers and wives, the chief sufferers from the liquor traffic."1 The unstated participant in this equation was males, without whom alcohol could not be transformed into agony for women.

A Failed Attempt to Regulate the Family

Nor did this anti-male reformist impulse stop with the success of the eighteenth amendment banning alcohol in 1920.

As Bill Kauffman explains in his history of the failed Constitutional amendment against child labor in the 1920's, the drive to ban child labor encompassed far more than just the issue of children working for wages in factories.

The text of the Amendment directly paved the way for this by stating the federal government shall have the power to "prohibit the labor of persons under eighteen years of age." The use of the word "labor" was significant, and thus extended the power of Congress far beyond employment for people under the age of eighteen. Both supporters and critics of the amendment interpreted "labor" to mean all labor, including chores performed within the home at the service of the family. Thus, the amendment was interpreted as allowing federal agents to regulate a parent's ability to require a seventeen-year-old-child to darn a sock, milk a cow, or help in the fields.

The underlying idea was that families were exploiting children by requiring household chores, and that modern "science" would tell us how to better raise our children instead: "if science determined that sewing buttons was bad for Susie, then Susie's mom must be prevented [by federal regulators] from passing on seamstress work to the poor girl."

The fact that these activities could be regulated or prohibited by the state right up until the child was eighteen years old, merely added insult to injury from the parents' perspective.

As Kauffman confirms, the cultural undercurrent beneath the Amendment was the fact that it was a continuation of the drive to prohibition:

First - and no one disputed this - the Child Labor Amendment was cousin­-germain to Prohibition. Drunkard fathers had necessitated the Eighteenth Amendment; indolent dads would force the Twentieth. American men, it was implied, were dissolute bums whose failings cried out for Washington's remedies.

Were men not so unreliable as providers for their families, the thinking went, they wouldn't need their children to work to make up for it. That is, if men adopted more productive ways - perhaps by eschewing their deplorable masculine vices - their children wouldn't have to trudge to factories at the cost of their educations.

There was, of course, plenty of opposition to this rhetoric at the time - even within reformist circles. In 1920, a female Party official at the GOP convention that year felt the need to clarify that "I most emphatically do not believe in the aggressive, antagonistic, anti-man spirit in politics." At the time, the Republican party was the home of the most aggressive reformers, and many party officials felt the need to separate themselves from these activists, just as some Democratic Party officials today must announce that they don't support Antifa. The interviewer, a writer for Good Housekeeping, informs the reader that by 1920 "the anti-man period of the woman movement is past. The day of sex-antagonism is past." The article, which apparently takes an anti-reformist position, may have drifted into some wishful thinking.2

Indeed, in her updated 1998 preface to The Feminization of American Culture, Douglas suspects that "Amid faux-feminist standards of sexual impropriety, proliferating lawsuits, and a tyrannical pop psychology of victimology, we are now conducting a series of cultural campaigns remarkably like the drives for Purity and Prohibition in which the reform impulses of my [Victorian] subjects culminated in the late nineteenth century."

So, while the age of "sex-antagonism" is not exactly past - thanks to all parties involved, by the way - there is a difference in the public policy landscape today. No crusade equal in power and scope to the 1920s movement to regulate every aspect of family life is viable - for now. Moreover, drug and alcohol prohibitions, if anything, are going in the opposite direction of what prohibitionists would like to see. Even the gun-abolition movement - which the Kiesel article connects to masculinity - appears to have presently fallen on hard times. In any case, the habit of connecting various social ills to the problem of "men" has a long and well-established history in American politics. Time will tell where the current phase leads.

Reader Comments

Interesting observation of history and the cyclical nature of social mores, but McMaken begins his article with the historically correct notation that:

She does - correctly - point out that the overwhelming majority of people who shoot other people are men.

and then never addresses that fact in any meaningful way. Since current science shows distinct biological differences exist between men and women that affect their social behaviors, and history shows men commit more of the violence, shouldn't this also be a topic of dispassionate study amidst all the other social chaos of the season?

I don't need to bring you down a peg to 'come up' a peg. Nor put you - or anyone else down - to seem 'better'.

The investment in such beliefs is 'madness' made normal.

If you are living in a state of madness - might it be because what you resist, persists?

The fixation in grievance determines powerlessness - assigned to the other or to outer circumstances.

Who is 'we' if not a collectivist manipulation to satisfy your current sense of what should be prohibited or stamped out?

The 'stomp out evil' brigade is the essential tool and lever of insane manipulators.

Innocence does not look out and see evil.

So look to that in (our) self that is hated in the other, with willingness to SEE differently.

Perception is distorted by fear, shame, guilt and hate.

An insane perception of the world can only propagate itself by seeking reinforcement in false witness.

I am not saying what anyone should do, I am reflecting the mind-habit that we are all already doing, and suggesting it is based on insanity. What is insanity but to be in some sense outside yourself, not yourself or dissociated from true relation.

Now it may be that sanity in this world, appears insane, because 'this world' absolutely rules out Innocence of being EXCEPT in support of grievance and the righteous reaction in hate (power set against another).

But if you should forget to focus in the hateful, and alight instead in some random moment of appreciation, an innocence of being moves within you.

If I accept myself worthy of love then I extend that worth equally unless I judge against myself in another. Does that mean I use the same formula to rel;ate to others? No - it means I don't trasj or put down, nor idolize and set up a brother or sister. Why the family naming? Because the same call for love is in all, regardless the distortions of our 'conditionings'. But unless we accept within ourself, we cannot recognize in others - nor extend that core sense of integrity of being - which has nothing to do with 'doing'.

That the abused, often go on to be abusers is not a justification, but a recognition that the cause is beneath the personal sense.

Stamping out - is the way to redistribute power to the hated - while grasping at a momentary sense of personal satisfaction in fantasy of vengeance. This is what is 'running' as the insane attempt to deny all that we are unwilling to face, to own and to release to a better choice.

Patriarchy has failed all. Matriarchy might be a backlash, asset forfeiture and all. Men hate even hearing or reading that, the self-enfranchisement they have enjoyed for several thousand years is ending, and they are going to cry like babies, become even more violent than they are now. End the need for money, and they would actually find something they are good at and love to do. They aren't good at organizing society, or self-regulating or fatherhood ( current western stats show an appalling number of men do not play any role whatsoever in the lives of their children) or of taking care of the planet. So, yes; Men, "you're fired". Women will now take everything from you, all assets, all power to contract, and you will stay on the farm, tend the melon patch and we'll let ya know when /if we need ya. Lafn...I can see this movement coming to a FEMA Camp soon; Fags Enjoying Melons Aplenty..find a cantaloupe, call her baby..cut her up and toss her when yer done..

I do say all tongue in cheek..but I can see this backlash coming to a millennial snowflake near you. She's "with her" and they both are wearing funny pink hats.